Thursday, 30 April 2020

The thing that strike me most about this virus SARSCOV2 is that it is a highly infectious viral infection, in that it transmits from human to human with relative ease.

There is a period where the infected person shows no symptoms, the person feeling no symptoms is wholly unaware of it and is therefore spreading the virus to other human beings without knowing that he or she is a vector of the viral spread.

Therefore the virus can run through any culture where there are many large group phenomena such as international travel on planes, boats, trains, shared public transport, pubs, clubs, football matches, prisons, care homes, parliaments, apartment blocks, temples of all kinds and large family homes and much else besides.

There is a blind spot among some fit healthy people that I have been feeling into and I will explore what this is in this article. "It can't be all that bad."

The dynamics of close urban living organisation and a silent virus.

In effect an invisible spread before any signs of it happening ever emerge.

Many people will become infected and they will show no symptoms at all. Their immune systems get on top of the virus before it causes any problems. Nobody is any the wiser. Nobody is at fault. We do not know why this is the case. All we have to go on is the experience. What happens.

Fit, healthy people can pretty much shake it off. There are exceptions, of course, and whilst media tend to hype those or minimise them, we are still learning about the disease state as we go and fear is not really useful, whereas caution is.

Stay calm, act responsibly for the whole community.

For the people with strong immune systems the viral infection appears to them to be a not so serious problem. For some it's not. There is no way to predict in advance if one is one of the unlucky few. It is a gamble, a risk.

For people whose immune system is compromised, the issue becomes the disease, COVID19.

The disease is what happens when the virus begins to replicate faster than the body's immune system can cope with, and starts to impact on the body. When the body's immune system response is not robust enough to stall the viral replication which destroys body tissue.

That is what the disease is - the destruction of tissues within the body as the virus takes over cells and then destroys the cell once it has replicated many more copies within the cell, releasing the replicates which seek out new cells and these repeat the cycle, thus destroying enough cells to cause a variety of breakdowns depending upon which tissue is affected, that can then lead towards death : liver, kidney, gut, lungs and heart can all be impacted.

The disease COVID19 is really, really dangerous to a significant percentage of those who have chronic immune compromising health issues, or co-morbidity's.

That is why the Government and NHS has issued instructions to people at risk to shield themselves.

If you can imagine what it is like to live in what is called shielded status, where you cannot be touched by anyone in your immediate family, for months on end, for a year, for a year and a half. A situation where everything that comes to you has to be washed and cleaned, a situation where all your facilities such bath, toilet, clothes washing and handling and all your cooking, if they are shared, must be policed with constant attention to detail every time anyone in your household uses those shared facilities. Imagine being confined to one room. Imagine have to think about every move you might make outside that one room.

Add to that the conflicting narratives that percolate across news media and social media, spreading confusion and uncertainty, and then we can see that there is an extra avoidable element of situational stress loaded onto people who are already dealing with significant stresses not of their own making.

Can you imagine living as an elder in care home that is shielded? The complexity and pressures that are added to those that already exist? What must it be like to be a carer at home?

What must it be like for carers working in large care homes?

In the UK population of people with multiple conditions is about 15 million people. Not all are shielded of course. There are degrees of vulnerability.

The existing data from around the world suggests that about 20% of that cohort will, if exposed to the virus, experience severe and critical symptoms of the disease, and about half of those will potentially become fatal. Breakdown of the bodies systems and organs. This is a horrific way to die.

How do we protect those people?

To protect the 10% most at risk we must protect all of those people who could be vulnerable.

Co-morbidity, Disability and Vulnerability within a stressed culture.

The impact of multiple stressors on the human body and psyche that arise from living within a culture where chronic stress and inter-generational trauma patterns remain largely unresolved is well understood in the medical world and not widely understood across the grass roots.

Observe how even media will publish articles that castigate people suffering from obesity: fat shaming is one aspect. Blaming smokers, suggesting they are doing it to themselves and should pay for their treatment, whilst protecting the Tobacco makers, even though we know that smoking involves addiction, The NHS offers treatment for that and other addictions.

This makes gathering the intention of the population to focus on the needs of the vulnerable more difficult than in ought to be. Nonetheless the majority of people are decent, and will take into consideration the vulnerabilities of their fellow citizens.

To protect the vulnerable, those people with multiple combined health issues, the only proven strategy is to stop them from getting the infection in the first place.

They must not meet the virus.

We do not have a vaccine. There are no medicines that can reliably prevent escalation of the disease or can be used as treatments of the disease. There is evidence that vitamin D and C have offer some degree of immune system boost. There is evidence reducing stress reduces immune system effectiveness, so it stands to reason that reducing stress improves immune response.

SARS was a corona virus pandemic that happened in 2003. It was less infectious than SARSCOV2 but more more lethal, with a case fatality rate of 60%, and because it generated symptoms rapidly it was much easier to trace and close down.

We still have no vaccine for that particular virus. The Governments in countries affected by SARS working with the WHO, informed populations of the threat and what needed to be done, contact tracing, quarantine, treatment in isolation, limiting movement for a period, and they stopped the spread, and in time eradicated the virus from the population. The same procedure was applied in 197-18 epidemic. The process has been learned over a 100 year term, with new learnings since SARS in 2003. In clearest terms we know that suppression of transmission can lead to elimination of transmission, and that cause eradication of a virus that cannot live outside a human body.

We hear talk of a vaccine.

However vaccines are very difficult to make, and even more difficult to test to the degree that they can safely be used across entire populations. Such is the risk that Governments indemnify vaccine makers from litigation and financial compensation that arise when a few cases of vaccination cause severe and lethal reactions.

There are only two strategies that can protect vulnerable people in this situation.

One strategy is to isolate all vulnerable people from the general population, to isolate them from any possible community infection vector. To enclose them behind a virus proof barrier.

That is really, really really difficult, and made much more difficult if you allow the rest of the population to slowly become infected while you wait for a vaccine. Waiting for a vaccine is not a health and safety protocol. Slow spread is not a health and safety protocol.

Those who service the vulnerable must also be isolated from the general population.

If they become exposed, then they must be set away from the vulnerable until they become provably immune, and can then re-introduced to continue their caring work - but they will still have to adopt clean site protocols upon entry into each caring facility as they could still carry the virus in by fomite transmission. Or they must live and work within the isolate environment of the point of care situation.

You have to somehow generate a population of immune people to service the vulnerable to maintain that separation from the virus, and you have to maintain that population in constant state of vigilant surveillance for viral particle presence.

The other way to protect the vulnerable is to stop the spread across the entire population.

That is to say to eliminate the transmission of the virus from within a given population, which leads to eradication of the virus. Stop the spread, spread the love.

This is also difficult, but it is proven. We know it works.

It was proven in SARS and MERS, and in other outbreaks of infectious disease where human to human transmission was the vector of spread. Suppression of the spread of infection, leading to elimination of community transmission and eventual eradication when the virus can find no new human hosts, and it dies out.

The process is complex, yes. It requires a lot of human resources, and a lot of co-ordinated action willingly undertaken by citizens, businesses and state officials. What makes it complicated are political and economic agendas intruding on the Health and Safety requirements.

New Zealand, Vietnam and others are showing that stopping the spread is a viable policy choice, across very different populations and economies.

Economics and Health and Safety.

Governments that have chosen the slow spread approach have all done so for economic and political reasons, not for health and safety or public health reasons.

And there is another dynamic that clouds the judgement of many people in this matter, going back to the start of this article.

Fit, healthy people are to a large degree thinking of and quite rightly concerned with how any of the protocols to stop the spread, social distancing, contact tracing and quarantine of workers, and a general shut down impacts them, their jobs and livelihoods. Because of the media narrative that the disease does not affect fit, healthy people, that many if not most will have no symptoms or will experience very mild symptoms,they are not so much worried about getting the infection and suffering severe symptoms.

Many believe that getting the infection will grant them immunity, and that as such getting the infection is desirable, to get it out of the way. This is understandable. They have not been given the full accurate picture.

Support - in economic terms - to take on the task of stopping the spread in the UK is minimal, and conditional and not well organised, as it was offered in an off the cuff move. This makes it less likely that working folk in the UK will readily consider what it might take to stop the spread - if your livelihood is under threat that is a reasonable feeling to have. They solution is to provide adequate and timely support. That is the job of the State in this kind of situation.

That the general population has been unwilling or disinterested in confronting this over the past ten or twenty years or so in any meaningful manner is largely a matter of how media refuses to cover the dynamic honestly, how ineffective Parliament has been as a body with oversight that reins in harmful policies, and how the media and right wing politicians have been pursuing narratives that undermine empathy for people who need and deserve support - the attack on the welfare state as a thing that undermines the economy.

The UN report into the mistreatment of low income, unemployed, chronically ill and disabled people in the UK, by Government policy, was barely noticed by the population, and almost totally ignored by the largely right wing media, and robustly denied by Government, without any firm rebuttal - because there was and is no defence of those policies given the harm they have caused.

With regards to SARSCOV2 and COVID19 the Government attitude and it's stance is clearly focused on the economy, rather than on the welfare of the whole population, fit and vulnerable alike. The poverty of 14 million people in the UK is real. The feeling of deprivation amidst a growing population of billionaires whose wealth gains are in inverse proportion to the wealth losses from the low income groups is real.

Ironically, many of the fit and healthy feel as if they are being oppressed by the situation of the shut down. That said most people are adhering to the social distancing measures, and are diligent in their compliance and that is a really wonderful phenomenon - I know that most people are decent people, caring people. That decency is not reflected in the corridors of power, as the PPE scandal and others reveals.

And there is a large degree of confusion and resentment across the divided UK electorate which is largely a consequence of Brexit and the deliberate bipolar adversarial dynamic deployed by it's proponents. So we can see that there's a lot going on here.

Protect the Economy, allow slow spread of the infection.

The confusion of political and economic and ideological perspectives in News media and across social media that filter perceptions of the nature of the threat and we have a perfect storm that creates confusion when what is need is clarity so that the population as a whole understands what is happening and what needs to be done.

Stop The Spread is the only viable policy facing this infectious disease.

Slow the Spread renders the whole population vulnerable. Loss of income is a serious leverage in deflecting attention from the realities of the Governments chosen stance. But we must transcend that and integrate it to resolve this situation.

What we are looking at is a factor that will determine the lethality of this viral infection will be socio-economic - low income population are much more at risk in any situation where an epidemic occurs.

Low income is a factor, as much as health and fitness, or lack of it in outcomes during an epidemic.

Universal Basic Income for the duration of a stop the spread policy duration could resolve that issue, and it would put cash flow into the local economies.

Global international general trade must take second place for the duration. Internationally, resources movement must take precedence over personal travel so that areas that are less developed are more effectively supported in stop the spread policy implementation. We need every state to follow the stop the spread protocols. We have to help each other through this.

Tourism and Air travel are luxuries that must wait. Both were major vectors of the global spread of the infection. Nobody is talking of blaming either of these, and nobody should. That said, caution must be the stance, a until we are in control of the pandemic.

The dynamics of power as a factor in the exploitation of the situation.

Bullies will always, always seek to exploit any emerging vulnerability in a family, village, town, organisation, institute or population where they hold degrees of power over others. This is a behavioural dynamic, almost an un-thought about reaction other than they will think about how to maximise the opportunity - they will not have to think about choosing to exploit the vulnerability, that will feel natural, second nature to the bully.

Trump, Johnson et al are clearly part of a bullying dynamic, as are their hard core supporters. Their behaviour reveals this. The hatred poured out at those who are their political opponents, the bile and the misleading narratives with which they project and scapegoat others is well documented.

I think that British Government and their sponsors have made a huge strategic error in allowing and endorsing a slow spread in order to protect the economy. That choice means that the hit to the economy will be much, much worse than if they had chosen the stop the spread policy, because it will mean extended periods of economic disruption as successive waves of opening up and closing down inevitably flow from the slow spread policy towards the fiction of 'herd immunity'.

The hubris and the arrogance of that decision stops them from admitting it, and now they are just bluffing through, which is why the media denial is so intense.

There is still time to stop the spread, but it means we must remove those in Government who refuse to take on that policy, because they have ideological and economic attachments to the slow spread policy and they cannot be trusted to carry through a stop the spread policy. Because they have already caused so much avoidable harm, they must be prevented from causing any more. They must be held accountable, and they must prevented from causing any more harm. The prevention of more harm has to be the primary concern right now.

We must address the issue of acknowledging that the often unspoken origin of distress, disease and ill health across entire populations lies in how power is mediated, and where that observation is avoided, ignored, muted and suppressed - we must confront the deliberate gaslighting focus on what is 'wrong' within the individual, that avoids addressing what is harmful about the culture itself.

That is a serious problem - the resolution of which must come from a widespread, accurate and wholly evidenced understanding of the situation and fuller engagement across the population based on that understanding. Honesty and transparency matter profoundly. Spin causes harm. Lies are wholly unacceptable.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

New Zealand announces today that transmission of SARSCOV2 virus from human to human within New Zealand has been stopped, and that they are on the road to eliminating the virus from the population.

There are still active cases. so the virus is still active in those people - there are no new cases of infection. They are well aware that more cases might emerge. They are being cautious and maintaining vigilance.

New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has said the country has stopped the “widespread, undetected community transmission” of Covid-19, as tough lockdown restrictions are scheduled to ease on Monday night.Ardern said New Zealand had “avoided the worst” in the pandemic, but must continue to fight the virus.“There is no widespread undetected community transmission in New Zealand. We have won that battle. But we must remain vigilant if we are to keep it that way,” she said.At 11.59pm on Monday, New Zealand will lift its level-4 lockdown which has been in place for more than four weeks. During that time, almost all businesses have been closed, along with schools while the population has been asked to remain in their homes for all but supermarket visits and short walks.Ardern said there was no way of knowing what may have happened without the level-4 lockdown.But she warned that in level-3 there were new risks – namely people coming into more contact with others."

This proves that STOPPING THE SPREAD is the only viable, grounded protocol for dealing with infectious diseases where no known vaccine or medical intervention exists.

If we examine the case of Vietnam, a populous state with a GDP per capita of US$2600 , we can see that the issue is not limited by relative wealth, size or population.

New Zealand, Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan and China reveal that stopping the spread protocols cut across all dynamics of political and economic approaches.

Looking into the future, New Zealand will need to maintain a vigilant infectious disease control monitoring and responding capability as a standard part of their Health System.

New Zealand will need to maintain 2 week Quarantine of all incoming passengers, which the non-New Zealand travelers must fund. Returning New Zealanders will be funded by the State. Immigrants must fund their own quarantine,

All quarantines must be tightly and transparently monitored.

These are the minimums to keep New Zealand safe.

In time these principles will apply to all States.

It is NEVER TOO LATE to implement a stop the spread protocol.

It is not a question of population size, or wealth.

Vietnam demonstrates that this is the case.

The Protocol for Stopping the Spread.

It is a question of providing accurate, precise information to all citizens, and to provide support in taking the correct action, as a collective working together to protect each other.

It is a matter of taking every case that presents, and tracing every contact of that person dating back the known incubation period, and checking with those people for past symptoms, current presenting symptoms and no symptoms.

It is a matter of assiduously continuing that process, case by case, group by group, village by village, neighbourhood by neighbourhood until all cases are tracked. Until the health system knows where every case of infection has been, and is emerging - do this until no new cases emerge.

Those presenting with symptoms must be given treatment in what we can call fever hospitals.

This is designed to isolate them from general population, so that they no longer act as spreaders of the infection. It is as designed to provide treatment that reduces escalation of their symptoms into severe or critical, to reduce the total number who end up needing intensive care.

This also protects pre-existing hospital systems, which can be maintained for general day to day practice apart from elective treatment, which can always wait.

There may be need to expand ICU capability and to construct extra isolate units away from main hospital services.

Those with no symptoms must be quarantined for the duration of incubation to first presenting symptoms.

As soon as they present symptoms, the are moved to treatment.

Then the matter of testing is about checking across the population of any given area to seek where the infection has been, where it is, and where it has not yet arrived...

These are all fundamentally simple protocols.

Their operation is complex, requiring resources and logistical support and human labour that is well orchestrated, from Government , Health Systems and Media, through to the individual citizen, working together:this does not have to be complicated.

What complicates matters are decisions based on ideological, political or economic agenda over-ruling Health and Welfare considerations.

That cannot be allowed to happen, anywhere, anytime..

In the UK that means we must examine and hold to account all such political and ideological decision making that has caused harm to citizens welfare, and leave no stone un-turned, no policy unchecked, no error un-corrected.

As a little gift, here is a song I pushed through, rough mixed from a single live take on a loopstation at home, under lock down...

Sunday, 19 April 2020

Boris Johnson, on February 3rd 2020, in a speech about Brexit to an audience in Greenwich, laid out the UK response to the SARSCOV2 pandemic in no uncertain terms.

Bear in that that the UK Government and Health officials had already received detailed warnings from WHO and other bodies of the COVID19 epidemic in China, and the ongoing pandemic across South East Asia, which was by this date already emerging within the UK.

The first cases of COVID19 in the UK were from a Chinese couple who had just returned from China, who fell ill in Newcastle; their status as COVID19 was announced January 30th, they had been ill a week already.. Other cases were soon to follow, and it was know that cases were emerging across Europe. Point being that by February 1st, a global pandemic situation was known to be emerging, all Governments were alerted.

"And in that context, we are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other.And here in Greenwich in the first week of February 2020, I can tell you in all humility that the UK is ready for that role.We are ready for the great multi-dimensional game of chess in which we engage in more than one negotiation at once and we are limbering up to use nerves and muscles and instincts that this country has not had to use for half a century."

In the early party of Johnson's speech he refers to the painting on the ceiling of the Greenwich Hall, and this chimes with my observations of the linkage between this situation, and that of the Late Victorian Holocausts in Ireland and India, the continuation of the attitude and the behaviour - the actions, outcomes and rationalisations - of British Empire Logic.

"It is great to welcome everyone here to Greenwich and I invite you first to raise your eyes to the heavens

The Vatican has Michelangelo.

Greenwich has Thornhill who spent 20 years flat on his back on top of the scaffolding, so rigid that his arm became permanently wonky, and he’s left us this gorgeous and slightly bonkers symbolic scene that captures the spirit of the United Kingdom in the early 18th century.

This painting above you was started in 1707, the very year when the union with Scotland was agreed – and does it not speak of supreme national self-confidence?

Look at these well-fed nymphs and cupids and what have you.

They are not just celebrating the Triumph of Liberty and Peace over Tyranny – the official title of the scene.

This is the settlement of a long and divisive political question about who gets to sit on the throne of England.

And it is visibly resolved as you can see in favour of William and Mary and the result is stability and certainty and optimism and an explosion of global trade propelled by new maritime technology."

There you have it.

This is a very serious situation.

We need the UK policy to move from slowing the spread to stopping the spread. This will call on all citizens to understand the situation as it really is, and to engage in what it will take to stop the spread of the infection, and in due course eradicate it from the UK population.

The slow spread policy is pretty much guaranteed to lead to waves of infection outbreaks, which in time could well lead to +100,000 deaths, possibly +250,000 - horrific deaths of people with chronic illnesses, trauma, disability etc, whose immune systems are compromised, including also those living in close confines such as care homes, prisons, temporary accommodation on council housing waiting lists, the homeless and many others - in the UK that demographic is close to 5,000.000 people.

1% would be 50,000 deaths and we are already heading for that number, with deaths close to 25,000 as of 19th April.

We NEED to stop all incoming air. land and sea travel or impose a two week quarantine of all incoming passengers, at hotels near the airports, monitored by health workers and police.

We need to fully equip NHS and carer staff with PPE and other essential tools to protect themselves.

We need to institute contact tracing, quarantine, treatment in isolation (not at home) where interventions can prevent escalation of cases into critical more readily.

We need to start the full protocols for stopping the spread, for protecting NHS and other vulnerable demographics. That means workers must be supported for the duration, by a temporary Universal Basic Income rather than Universal credit, to bear the burden, and that money will flow back into the local economy.

We cannot allow another day of "protect the Hoard, let the herd take it on the chin" as the official policy of the UK and it's peoples.

We might well need Parliament to reconvene to remove the PM, the entire Cabinet and Cummings, and the BIT team led by David Halpern, and I would suggest go as far as arresting them for gross malfeasance in public office, (their policy decision and actions, their rationalisations of what they have been doing goes way beyond incompetence) to be held on remand until we have stopped the spread of the viral infection, and eradicated it from the UK population. They are already obfuscating and getting in the way, and cannot be trusted to do what needs to be done.

We can address their culpability in detail when our vulnerable population are safe.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Friday, 17 April 2020

The lock down, keep your distance, no large crowds, stay at home, isolate the elderly and the vulnerable for 12 weeks and wash your hands approach is best described as the top down approach.

It is imposed or suggested from above.

It is an umbrella policy.

It is a very broad brush.

It has no detail.

It is partly an order, and partly an advice, issued by the UK Government.

The policy is to slow the spread of the infection.

As things stand there is no policy in place to stop the spread of the infection.

Two entirely different policy choices, with profoundly different outcomes.

The UK Government's claim is that this slowing of the spread is necessary in order to prevent a potential overwhelm of the NHS as it stands.

Their claim is that by isolating the elderly and those in care settings we can allow the infection to spread among the general population of 'fit' people and thus protect the vulnerable and the NHS.

Sounds good.

What does slow the spread of infection really mean?

It means to allow the spread of the infection, albeit more slowly than if we all went out and carried on as normal, effectively deliberately exposed ourselves to the viral infection by continuing with our everyday interactions.

The infection WILL spread, just slowly. That is what slow spread means.

The Government ignored calls by responsible health professionals an epidemiologists to properly resource the NHS and the 15,570 care homes across the UK with PPE.

The UK Government ignored calls to make other provisions in advance, calls that were made from early January when the genome of the new virus was sequenced, and the virus given it's name (SARSCOV2). The disease was named COVID-19 (Corona Virus Disease 2019).

Because of that failure to respond to rational warnings, the NHS frontline staff have been placed in harms way, they are forced to deal with a multitude of cases of infection without the appropriate protection kit, and other essential supplies amidst staff and bed shortages, and they are suffering the impact of the governments choice, and we can see clearly now that the claim that they are protecting the NHS was and is obviously false.

They knew it was false the day they announced the policy to slow the spread of the infection.

Slowing the spread means infections have already hit care homes, and the entire population within care homes, carers and the cared for alike, are now at serious risk because they do not have the PPE kit and other situational practices to prevent infection spread.

Therefore the claim to be protecting the elderly and the people in care homes was a non-starter, it is demonstrably not the case.

What does slowing the infection spread mean for the 5,000,000 people in the UK with known chronic compromised immune system conditions?

It means they are guaranteed to be imprisoned, in isolation or in shielding, for as long as the spread is allowed to progress, however slowly. It means masses of early, painful, horrific deaths within that cohort - a conservative estimate would be 1% of that population would be 50,000 deaths.

Slowly, over a period of a many months, or more up to a tear - what does that mean?

"We know we can get this under control,” says Dr Anthony Costello, a former Director at the World Health Organisation (WHO), where he headed up maternal, child and adolescent health. “The problem is that Europe has been too slow to act compared with Asia; and America is now facing a huge crisis.”Costello, who is Professor of Global Health at University College London where he previously headed up the UCL Institute for Global Health, spoke to me via telephone from Yorkshire, where he is currently isolating from his family members, many of whom are experiencing symptoms of the novel Coronavirus.Having worked at the WHO from 2015 to 2018 before returning to UCL, Costello pulls no punches about the failures that, he says, have allowed the virus to rampage across Western countries.He is also concerned about tepid Government messaging. “It’s not enough to just have modellers, virologists and behavioural scientists.

You need people who can translate this into action. Social scientists. Public health experts experienced in community mobilisation.

Right now, we are locked into this strange idea that the Prime Minister or President makes a speech and suddenly the entire country changes its mind. That’s just a fantasy.

Throughout my career, I’ve seen that just giving people a few of the right messages won’t necessarily change behaviour. We need a more serious, decentralised approach and to share data with local communities.”He refers to some of China’s mass communications measures.

“The Chinese managed to suppress the virus in provinces outside Wuhan without the same sort of total lockdown by operating quickly.

They had a TV station giving out information on the virus round-the-clock on a 24-hour basis.

We had policing of supermarkets and pharmacies.

But most importantly we had a comprehensive mass testing and contact tracing programme. And proper protection for frontline health workers. And that’s how this was brought under control within seven weeks.”

Which is to say take the proven steps to eradicate the virus from within the population in any given area, from a village to towns, to cities and entire territories.

Because we have no vaccine we have no time to waste.

There is no lee-way, no room for any margin of error. Every error will cost lives, will cause avoidable horrible deaths.

So here is the protocol to stop the spread of infection.

A) Officially declare a legal shut down, and pay all non-essential workers to stay at home, by providing a Universal Basic Income for the duration of 3 months itwho would take to stop the spread, and eradicate the virus from the population.

To make this easier to bear, if UBI is not acceptable then consider a pause rents, mortgages, major bill payments and roll out temporary income support for the duration of the program to stop the spread of the infection.

That money will not be wasted, it will be going back into the local economy.

Support all essential workers - food production, distribution and retail, public transport, utility, health, police, fire brigades, NHS, military and civil service by ensuring they have full PPE and training adequate to their roles, and provide them and their employers with exact and accurate information on the virus, the infection, the disease and the protocols demanded by the situation.

Clear communications that treat the citizens as rational adults.

B) Roll out fully resourced contact tracing - Trace all the contacts of every case that presents, and meet each and everyone of those contacts with a team who can gently and firmly assess and test every one of those contacts to see if they

1) have the virus - send for treatment in isolation wards to avoid treatment at home which leads to more spread

2) have the antibody - have survived the infection, are presumed immune

3) have not yet been infected - people who could become infected - they must be protected from contracting the infection and also quarantined for two weeks to see if symptoms emerge.

Use school buildings that are empty as co-ordination centers locally. Distribute testing and organise local contact tracing through these as well.

C) Treat symptomatic people from the contact list and all who present with symptoms in isolation hospitals, rather than leaving them at home, where they can spread the infection, and where the patients condition can escalate without support to deal with that.

(This was observed in Wuhan before the contact tracing and new build isolation hospitals kicked in - in the end they had 1800 teams of 5 people each meeting all the contacts, contact tracing is resource heavy in that it needs lots of people working at it, nonetheless it works really well, and then mobile phone tech was integrated into that to monitor symptoms and spread. Potentially hundreds of thousands of jobs which puts more cash back into the local economy and build community cohesion at the same time.)

D) Quarantine all asymptomatic contacts, and as soon as they show symptoms, move them to treatment hospitals to prevent or reduce escalation to severe or critical - this also means less pressure on the available intensive care units and general hospital admissions.

E) Everyone who is quarantined is supported financially and monitored for signs of symptoms so that earliest treatment can be given, to reduce escalation of symptoms into severe or critical.

If the Government had taken this route, back in February, or even in Early March, a method which is proven already in 5 largely urbanised states, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea and is being deployed successfully in others as I write, we would be closer to stopping the spread and then eradicating the infection spread within the UK population.

We know that it would take 8-12 weeks to stop the spread across a large populous state.

Those states that have applied this protocol are experiencing imported cases, that is to say the infection is being carried in by travellers from outside those States are bringing the virus back into those virus free territories.

F) Quarantine all incoming travellers, via Air, Land or Sea, for two weeks, and monitor them strictly.

If the Government were to move immediately to stopping the spread with an eye to eradication, we could clear the infection within three months.

We have the resources, we have the people, we have the desire - but do the Government share this vision?

The aim is to find all infection routes and to chase them down to where everyone infected is known and observed, and no new infections are starting - when the virus runs out of new hosts, it vanishes in that population. Quarantine must be fully implemented upon all incoming and returning domestic and international air, sea and land travel. Even from Northern Ireland.

Instead the UK Government policy is encouraging the slow spread of infection, and pretty much guaranteeing importing extra new infections by way of air, sea and land travellers arriving from other countries where there are serious infection outbreaks, because, as of today, 17 April 2020 is no testing or quarantining of those arrivals.

This is insane.

Let me repeat - within the UK we could, given the fullest resourcing, eradicate the virus in 3 months.

Then a fully funded quarantine must be in place for all incoming or returning travellers to maintain that eradicated status, until a vaccine is available or we have implemented the stop and eradicate policy across the Earths states and communities...

Allowing the slow spread will play out over many, many more months.

In economic terms the difference is between losing three months of GDP or losing a years GDP plus the other costs as various systems reach collapse or stress beyond repair due to continued shut down, re-opening and further waves of infection outbreaks generating a cyclic pattern that persists because there is no vaccine.

It's not just about me, or you my dear reader, it is about all of us.

This situation is about all of humanity as one human family, one society of many cultures and languages, it is about unity across diversity.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Saturday, 11 April 2020

By slowing down rather than stopping the spread of infection the UK government are guaranteeing that the bulk of the population will become infected and the mortality rate for vulnerable people will stay the same, it will just happen more slowly.

The 'shut-down' policy was sold as an attempt to ensure NHS and other health services do not collapse under a 'short term' burden. They ordered the isolation of all elderly people and known cases of immune compromised chronic conditions, without any provision to protect them from the spread.

That theory was destroyed by the lack of PPE, shortages of trained staff, lack of other supplies, kit and logistical support which the Government was warned about, in detail, from Operation Cygnus in 2016 and throughout January 2020. All deliberate choices by this Government and it's predecessors.

The UK Government had time to prepare, they had the time to stop and check and quarantine the inflow of infected people from abroad, via air travel and cruises, and land be they immigrants, returning holiday makers or business travellers.

Merely slowing down the spread of infection is exactly what the Chinese, Koreans , Singaporeans and Taiwanese did NOT contemplate - they went for eradication - find every case, quarantine all contacts, treat everyone who is symptomatic in isolation hospitals, maintain vigilance, deal with outbreaks rapidly until no new cases emerge after two months.

This is an imperfect method, in that it cannot find every single case in one swoop.
It is a method that takes time and resources, and importantly must be very well understood by the population that is infected and engaged with as such.
Communication must be clear, exact, honest and 100% evidence based.
Support for everyone affected must be provided by the State, in terms of resources, living wage income protection, treatment facilities and social welfare.
It includes maintaining vigilance, so that even after a two month period of no new infection, the readiness to respond to a new infection remains active and agile.
When we know the virus has no new hosts, say after 6 months, then we know that that particular virus has been eradicated. This is entirely possible. The only barrier is economic or political will."

Then we know the virus has no new hosts, and is eradicated.

Maintain vigilance, and maintain capacity to respond rapidly to every new outbreak to isolate it and eradicate that infection spread in that locality.

Slowing down was merely always a staging step towards eradication. It should never be set as a move on it's own.

The UK Government has no intent or policy of eradication of the virus in the population - this is insane, especially on an island.

Their decision is not based on epidemiology or public health - it is a purely economic political decision. Slowing down the spread, and what it means. Data modelling and behavioural sciences!

Slowly is ten thousand preventable, horrific deaths in two weeks and rising.

Slowly is grinding on in spite of avoidable shortages of PPE for front line health workers, and the attrition rate that has on frontline staff.

Slowly is interminable when there is no contact tracing, and no testing happening in the UK.

This is eugenics by default, straight up.

It is not intentional eugenics. They are not that evil.

It is not that they want us dead, it is that in order to protect their status and their material power and wealth (their assets) they will abandon the most vulnerable. (everybody else).

As in The Vatican hiding away abusers to protect their status. This is a well known pattern of behaviour.

The 'wanting us dead' narrative is hype, beloved of conspiracy theories and it tends to undermine effective understanding of the situation.

The reality is much worse, far more chaotic and random, and thus more tractable because the illusion of total control is an illusion - a theory if you will.

What does slowly mean, in a conservative estimate?

In the UK 10% of known immune compromised people (about 5 million) still means potentially 500,000 horrific deaths. slowly over a year. 10, 000 a week, sustained.

Is that acceptable?

No.

Is this a viable long term solution?

No.

Stopping the spread dead where ever it emerges, rapidly, is the correct protocol, at every stage of the spread of the infection - chase down every infection, trace and quarantine all contacts, offer treatment away from home, in isolation hospitals ,etc. until there are no new cases, and the virus cannot find any new hosts and it dies out.

THAT is the only viable solution - it will demand that full logistical and resource commitment to do that.

Is it worth a years GDP to do this?

I say it is.

Easily, It's worth ten years GDP.

Everybody's life matters.

Eradicate the virus by robbing it of new human hosts.

The PM, and the entire Cabinet needs to be arrested for malfeasance in public office and held on remand for the duration. Fired.

We need a government that will pursue stopping the spread, eradicating the infection from these islands, by robbing it of new human hosts, informed by epidemiology, public health practice, social welfare and trauma informed approaches. And that must exclude Keir Starmer, for obvious reasons.

We do not need a government operating on the basis of data modelling and behavioural sciences.

We need a Government that will pay the people to stay at home, no questions asked, for the duration. A government that will give the people clear, accurate, scientifically grounded information that the citizens can engage with as equals, as adults who are working together.

There is no vaccine. It is not on any horizon.

The infection and disease cannot be allowed to slow spread - in the UK there are 5,000,000 people with known immune compromised health conditions, the cost to those people is intolerable - if it costs three years GDP it would still be cheap by comparison.

It doesn't have to cost that much.

Eradication, if fully resourced, will take approximatley three months - the slow spread will take much, much longer.

Eradication is better for the people and the economy by all measures.

Ensure that in future outbreaks of a novel virus similar to this, the protocols to stop the spread, and
eradicate the virus by depriving it of new hosts, are implemented at pace, from the start.

I do not oppose Vaccines, and I do not accept that they are anything but a very last resort in cases such as the SARS and SARSCOV2 viruses.

Selection of infectious diseases for eradication is based on rigorous criteria, as both biological and technical features determine whether a pathogenic organism is (at least potentially) eradicable.

The targeted organism must not have a non-human reservoir (or, in the case of animal diseases, the infection reservoir must be an easily identifiable species, as in the case of rinderpest), and/or amplify in the environment. SARS and SARSCOV-2 fit into this criteria.

This short paper discuss's the success of the shutting down of the SARS 2002-3 epidemic.

So called 'activists' or writers or pundits who do not follow due diligence on material they generate or re-post on social and press media are being exploited by professional grooming gangsters.

Re-posting on Social Media.

Have you checked and verified , or did the text trigger an emotional reaction that led you to re-post it.

The latter is you being groomed.

What is grooming in this context?

Organised, well funded operations that target and manipulate peoples social wounded-nesses, insecurities, prejudices, worries, misunderstandings, cultural conditionings and fears, and do that through public and private media media, through marketing, propaganda, media campaigns operating on an industrial scale, manipulating vulnerable people for ideological, religious, political or economic advantage.

David Icke is a grooming gangster, an independent grooming gangster.

Nigel Farage is a grooming gangster.

Boris 'the tackler' Johnson is a grooming gangster.

The Telegraph is a grooming gang, a Corporate Plutocracy Grooming Gang.

Fox News is a grooming operation.

Trump and Johnson are grooming gangsters.

The Vatican is a grooming gang, a religious Mafia. They all are.

God's representatives needs your money? Grooming!

Heaven and Hell? Grooming!

Karma? Grooming!
.
The Church of England, The Crown and The Queen are all part of a grooming gangster mafia.

Justin Beiber, a grooming exercise.

The X-Factor, a grooming exercise.

XR is a grooming exercise. It might not want to be, but it is. Leaders, emotive messaging, false premise for action (3.5% enough to drive change is ludicrous and delusional).

Grooming and marketing, selling your brand, making a profit without paying all the costs associated with what ever it is you do is grooming gangster activity.

If the grooming gangsters are willing to destroy whole states, if they are willing to murder citizens through warfare, if they are willing to allow millions to die to achieve Hoard Immunity for their wealth and power, then you, as a citizen needs to wake the fuck up!

Waking up is becoming wholly honest, transparent, vulnerable and unwilling to accept a moment of deceit as we move forwards through this horror show. Waking up is exercising the mind and body to become fit enough to confront the reality and sustain our efforts.

Waking up is taking on the responsibility of healthy, transparent, loving and secure attachment bonded parenting as the most important revolutionary act of all. Especially if you have no children of your own...

We are all parents of all the children, their future is our collective responsibility.

Waking up is an act of self and communal liberation from the delusion of Libertarianism.

Waking up is coming home.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

1. Early in March, the New Zealand's Government began to instruct all international visitors — in normal times, the country gets as many as 4 million tourists a year — to self-isolate for 14 days.

Then on March 19, the tourism-dependent nation fully closed its borders to international visitors, a move that was likely effective because it came before community spread took off locally.

They NZ government demanded people quarantine at home or in local hotels, they covered the costs (hotel or loss of income) and they policed it robustly, yet kindly.#

In the UK people returning from Northern Italy (Ski Holidays) where there were numbers of cases emerging in February were not checked, not asked to quarantine. Yes, they were allowed to return to the community and share their good fortune, share their holiday photo's, compare their suntans to the pasty white of those who did not have the good fortune to take a mid term holiday on the snowy slopes.

They brought back the disease as a silent gift. This was not heir fault - the UK Government absolutely failed in it's duty of care to each and every one of those holiday makers and to their communities to which they returned.

There were travellers arriving from where ever the viral infection was emerging, at every UK airport.

There are still flights coming into Heathrow as of today, 11th April, arriving from New York and other locations where outbreaks are surging, and there are still no health checks and no request or provision for quarantine. ,

2. Just as importantly the Ardern government pushed a strong "stay home" message beginning early in the crisis, and implemented a strong social distancing ORDER as of March 23. The order shut schools and nonessential services and banned many outdoor activities.

It was not 'suggested advice'.

New Zealanders (including immigrants) have also received recurring payments the government designed to make it easier to people to avoid working, thus to remain in quarantine.

No similar policy here - I am self employed, if I apply now, I will start to receive income in May or June - I will be utterly broke and about £1000 down in bills by that stage, plus extra 500+ on a credit card for just to buy the most basic foods.

My income will be 80% of what I earned last year, which comes to about £96 weekly.

I never have earned much, but because I know how to live cheap (the artist must) I could get by. That is now looking less likely.

I am one of the lucky ones, there are millions of people in the UK are facing possible destitution right now, as their daily fare.

A member of Ardern's government caught mountain biking and beach going with his family even faced public condemnation from the prime minister.

Here a minister does the same, and a few words of complaint from dull witted pundits is all that happens.

Boris Johnson is getting praise from the media, for being ill and for recovering (a recovery made possible by frontline NHS staff taking daily risks) and is now in hiding, recuperation...

The core epidemiological strategy Contact Tracing and quarantining is not happening in the UK at all.

Nada. Take it on the Chin. Herd Immunity. (Hoard Immunity - protect the Wealth)

Testing is also not happening.

Massive disruption to testing supplies due to claims they do not work (the Government we are told bought 17 million)

How does a Government order 17 million of anything only to find that the product does not work?

Did they get samples and test those?

Did they examine the manufacturers evidence, their scientific and technical papers that must be publicly available, that prove the efficacy of the product?

None of this information is available, Government is not presenting it.

Just as they refuse to present the 'scientific evidence' for their original policy of 'take it on the chin'.

We do know they are urging British manufacturers to make kits. That pattern of cancelling orders of proven equipment, and then giving the order to companies closer to the Conservative donor base is one to be watched very carefully. Dyson sucks.

4. The NZ government treated the citizens as adults, and told them exactly why these measures were needed. Direct, honest communication from the start. They did not rely on 'Behavioural Sciences' or 'Nudge' or 'suggested advice'.

That meant that from the very start that the citizens had provision of accurate timely information that they could trust, therefore engage with. Which they did.

The British Government treated us all like idiots and economic cannon fodder.

This has an historical resonance, one that approved state hagiographers such as Simon Schama are unwilling to acknowledge. The Irish and Indian Famines of the mid to late 1800s - 'let the people take it on the chin, protect the Wealth.' Same old, same old.

5. The Ardern Government injected a very well considered economic package to small and medium businesses, farms, community groups, the unemployed and arranged mortgage pauses, banned evictions, increased weekly benefit payments and worked with the larger corporations to make life bearable for the duration.

The UK Bailed out the stock market and corporate sector, and provided conditional loans for British workers and small businesses, and the hope of future support to the huge self employed and gig economy workforce.

Yes, hope. Sometime in June.

And still is not providing adequate PPE for frontline staff. Employers are still forcing workers to work without adequate PPE. Universal Credit's online application systems are log jammed, close to collapse.

The British Government have co-opted every call for support and turned each into a wealth grabbing opportunity for their Corporate sponsors.

It has everything to do with the culture of power, and the compliant servility of Government, Civil Service, Parliament and news media as a whole to the concept of the Crown and The Flag behind which the Establishment Status Quo of Empire, the Plutocracy, the Spiders' Web of Economic, Political and Military Power hides, and which must be insulated from emergence of the ordinary citizen as an equal partner - the entitlement to rule is both genetic and by divine right, and citizens should know their place.

I have written more than enough about the regularity of scapegoating by both Government and Mefia in the UK, and how it operates. I coined the term 'political grooming gangs'. A term totally unacceptable to the status quo, and indeed to most people in the UK. Too bad. Get used to the smell of this cup of coffee. I am not going to alter my position because it is the honest truth.

7. The only thing holding the UK together is the decency of ordinary people. Nothing else.

Keir Starmer was raising questions about an Exit Strategy this morning. What a dull servile grovelling official he is. Exit Strategy? We are not yet even in the end of the beginning of this dreadful shituation and he's whinging about exit strategy? Rebecca Long Bailey would not be so servile.

Unless Keir Starmer (and by extension Labour, Greens, Independents, SNP, Plaid and decent Conservatives) calls for a unity Government void of the current Cabinet, (who ought to be arrested) a unity Government informed by epidemiology, clinical care, trauma informed social care and economic kindness to workers, funded by the Tax Havens and their trillions, he is a servile, compliant betrayer of the UK Citizenry.
There is nothing more to be said.
Arrest the Mefia barons too, who have enabled of of this...

The Queen is nothing. The Prince of Wales is nothing. Parliament is nothing. The Mefia are nothing,

The decency of ordinary people is everything.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.

Saturday, 4 April 2020

The image above is The Telegraph front page March 16th, in which the editing contrast some black people stocking up with loo roll against the idea of punishing people who refuse to go into quarantine, when there was no such policy..... scapegoating in classic style.

They alerted their citizens, as soon as they were aware they were dealing with a new infectious virus that we have no immunity for and had confirmed that by sequencing the genome.

The treated their citizens as adults, and the told them EXACTLY what was at stake, and they provided the resources for programs designed to limit the spread of infection and bring it to halt, and treat those who were ill, and protect the more vulnerable and they trusted the citizens to engage with that.

They provided economic and financial support to the citizens as they went through that process.
And that is what the citizens of those four states did.
They did not have to be ordered and forced - China did introduce Laws to shut down and that was less about force than about marshalling the resources to protect the people.

2. The British media have played the narratives that have scapegoated the citizens who were frightened, confused, mislead and acted in panic and confusion in order to protect the governments neglect of their duty of care

When the first surge of deaths emerged around 10th-14th March, they proposed locking all the elders and other vulnerable people in their homes, to protect them, and let the fit population handle getting infected.

That was official policy.

The medical and epidemiology community pushed back, and that policy lasted less than 24 hours...

3. Since then confusing messaging and piecemeal policy adjustments has meant that a degree of confusion amongst the citizens remains - then we can factor in the UK Column Brexit community and the Con Theory community spreading profoundly damaging content far and wide - and we get idiots everywhere taking a parties, having a day out at the beach, etc...

Whilst the vast majority of citizens get on with the shut down and stay at home protocol because they want to protect the NHS, who as it happens are, even today 4th of April, still working without correct protective kit for handling a surge of patients presenting with a viral lung infection that is life threatening for tens of thousands of vulnerable people.

And the media hype the behaviour of the minority, and allow that misrepresentation to roll, which makes more people angry at each other - and the government will exploit that as an excuse to introduce 'draconian measures'... watch and see.

The total vulnerable population in UK is just over 5 million people, out of 65 million.

That's disabled folk, chronically ill folk, people living in temporary accommodation, the homeless, the people in prisons and detention centers, on remand, in psychiatric hospital and in day to day hospitals, the people in need of care assistance at home, people in hostels and refuges, large families sharing small houses and apartments.

If 1% of those people are infected and the infection causes them to die an horrific death, that is 50,000 people.

That is 50,000 avoidable horrible deaths in a few weeks, or a month.

4. So, having explained my position, please let us not blame the our fellow citizens - focus all ire on the people who put us all in this position to protect the 'economy' the Wealth, and the few who spout con theory and fear of totalitarian European or Global overlords, etc to a vulnerable, gullible audience.